Madelyne is a microbial ecologist who earned her Ph.D. in Ecology and Environmental Science from Montana State University in 2025. She has extensive field experience, including multiple deployments to the Arctic and Antarctic. Her research has focused on the identification of metabolic activity in bacterial cells in glacial ice and other cold environments. Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability, where she is studying how microbes on the floor of the Pacific Ocean’s San Pedro Channel process methane. Madelyne is also a Co-I on the SCOUT project, a NASA grant to demonstrate multispectral imaging for the classification of organic matter and cells, while using rock glaciers as an analog for midlatitude glaciers on Mars.